


Equal Partners

by polysyndeta



Series: Triumvirate [4]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: I probably undertag things, Kink Negotiation, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Master/Slave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3543632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polysyndeta/pseuds/polysyndeta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And of course the Kingsmen developed a daft fucking series of nonverbal cues to arrange their kinky get-togethers, but the thought is imbued with a perverse fondness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equal Partners

**Author's Note:**

> So I just lost the fic I was working on (learn from me, don't keep your fics in a Gmail draft) so this is just a little something I had floating around my head. Pornfailed again. Apologies.

So it's weird. Fucking amazing, but weird. 

Because in some ways - most ways - it's like having the two best boyfriends a (slightly affection-starved, approval-dependent) lad could ask for. Caring, and affectionate in their own ways, and stupidly good in bed. The fact that they're both stone cold badasses who'd make James Bond and Q turn gay and piss themselves respectively is just a bonus.

In other ways, though, it feels like a weird extension of his training. Sometimes Galahad-and-Merlin are indistinguishable from Harry-Hart-and....okay, still Merlin (is that fucked up? It's probably fucked up), just because their terrifying competence doesn't stop outside the bedroom. Eggsy thinks he can give a decent blowjob, until Harry pins him down with his mouth on his cock and a finger up his arse and does some weird tantric shit that keeps him on the edge of orgasm for half a fucking hour. He actually blacks out for a second when he comes, which he didn't think really happened outside his mum's Mills & Boon novels.

(Do they have a gay imprint? He's got some shit to sell them. _The Chav And His Super-Spy Lover And Their Incredibly Well-Hung Scotsman_.)

But _then_ there's all the Fifty Shades bollocks, which he discovers by accident. Not even accidentally-on-purpose, but come the fuck on, it's not his fault that Harry keeps his little arsenal of kink behind a fake wall over the chimney breast that _happens_ to be triggered by tapping a mantelpiece ornament three times. He's just fidgeting around the man's bedroom and then it’s _there_.

Eggsy could close it up, but he doesn't, because it’s not in his nature to just pretend things haven’t happened. He just sits on the bed and waits for him to get finished up in the shower, peering into Harry's Red Cupboard Of Pain all the while. Most of the stuff in there, he either knows what it does, or he could make an educated guess. Some of the stuff - no.

Harry takes another five minutes and reappears to find Eggsy fidgeting with a leather flogger. Eggsy doesn't ask, just tilts his head and arches his eyebrows. And Harry don't even blink, don't blush or stammer, 'cause of course not. He just says

"We lead very intense lives. Sometimes that requires a very intense form of relief."

like that's an end to it.

It's not.

"So when was you and Merlin gonna tell us about this?" His tone's light because he's expecting something along the lines of _soon_. He'd even accept _now_.

"We weren't," Harry says instead, clipped, and reaches to take the flogger from his hand. Eggsy lets it go, mostly out of shock.

"But you're _into_ all this shit," Eggsy says, and Harry cringes infinitesimally. "Weren't you ever gonna - "

"Eggsy, Merlin and I are not two dirty old men inducting you into the more esoteric aspects of our sex life. You're an equal partner in our relationship. That means we trust you to raise the subject of any 'shit' you happen to be 'into'."

"But, what, you can't trust me to even _know_ about yours? Why have I gotta bring it up? Why've I gotta be the perv?" A sharp, crackling energy pulls him onto his feet, makes him bounce on his heels.

"If that's the way you're going to talk about - "

" _Fuck_ off. This is that night at Merlin's all over again, y'know that? You freaking out and then tellin' me _I_ shouldn't've seen that? You didn't say shit to Merlin."

"Merlin is - "

"What, your _real_ boyfriend?"

The words flatten the room into silence. Harry looks hurt but Eggsy refuses to see it.

"And I'm just your fuckin' accessory, is that it? Equal partner _my arse_."

" _Eggsy_ \- "

"Shut up! I don't wanna hear it. Fuck off down Smith Street if that's what you fuckin' want, the pair of you."

He slams the door on the way out. Then goes out and gets shitfaced.

Galahad is posted to Switzerland the following morning. When Eggsy hears about it, the thought of what happened _last_ time they left an argument unfinished is so sharp and sour that he actually has to run out of the shop and puke in the gutter like the class act he is.

Post-hangover, he finds Merlin at HQ, taking apart a laptop. He lingers at the threshold and kicks at the floor miserably.

"Me'n Harry had a fight," he concedes after two minutes of Merlin ignoring him.

"As you said yourself, we _do_ talk to each other." He gestures at the empty chair next to his with a screwdriver. "Sit."

He sits.

"Why din't you tell me?"

"Because it is _not_ a major part of our relationship, and we're already navigating a pretty major power imbalance _out_ side of that without bringing it _in._ "

"With respect, you can piss _right_ off, Merlin, I know that just cuz you get to boss us around in 'ere doesn't mean you get to boss us around when we're fuckin'."

"I know you know."

Eggsy's thrown by that. He doesn't often get Merlin telling him he's right. And then Merlin turns to stare at him.

"But look me in the fuckin' eye and tell me you wouldn't do something 'cause _Harry_ wanted to, even if you didn't want it. Tell me you wouldn't lie back and think of England and tell him afterwards you loved every second of it. And tell me you don't think he'd know that's exactly what you did. Tell me that, Eggsy."

And Eggsy Unwin, occupational liar since he was twelve and his mum (smiling for the first time in years) asked him if he didn't mind Mister Baker being around the house a bit more, can't do it.

" _Shit._ "

"Indeed." Merlin turns back to his work and for a second Eggsy wonders if he's being dismissed, but no, he refuses to let that be the end of the conversation.

"So is that - it, then?"

"Specifics help us all, Eggsy - _there_ you are, you little bugger." Eggsy watches him prise a microchip free from the underside of the heat sink.

"You, me an' him. Is it done?"

"You hurt him. Insulted the pair of us. But no. Neither of us want it to be." Merlin's quiet for a few moments, then sighs heavily. "We ought to have handled this better as well. You do have a point, Eggsy. We hid something from you, thought it was for a good reason, maybe it wasn't."

Eggsy settles in his seat at last. He doesn't really feel smug or vindicated, just...calmer. Being a gentleman, he's realising, isn't about being right all the time. It's about acknowledging when you're wrong, and having the humility to learn from it.

"When's Harry back?" he asks quietly.

"Shouldn't be more than a week."

Eggsy goes to the HQ library. He's not surprised that there's like an entire shelf dedicated to BDSM. 

The conversation they have the next day, and two days after that, and two days after _that_ , take a different tone. 

As does the (longer, more _involved_ ) conversation they have with Harry from his hotel room in Davos. The conversation where they write lists, and discuss safety, and make plans.

On the seventh day, Merlin and Eggsy are in Harry's bedroom, sitting side by side on his bed while Merlin calmly puts a Windsor knot into one of his own ties. The tie Eggsy brought with him, by request, is draped over Merlin's lap.

"It's shorthand," Merlin explains. "We don't often have the privacy to talk about these things when he's on his way home from a debrief. Hence: tie on the doorknob. No American dorm room jokes, please. Four-in-hand means I want to sub; Windsor means I want _him_ to sub."

"We talked about this, though. We talked about it for _fuck_ in' ages. We know what we're doin'."

Merlin tightens the knot. "Call this an old habit dying hard, then."

Eggsy thinks for a few moments.

"...what if he's changed 'is mind and he don't fancy doin' that? Or anythin?"

"He brings the tie in with him, untied, and we talk it over. He leaves the tie on the doorknob, and we make different plans altogether."

And of course the Kingsmen developed a daft fucking series of nonverbal cues to arrange their kinky get-togethers, but the thought is imbued with a perverse fondness.

Merlin picks up Eggsy's tie and starts looping. Eggsy watches him. Another Windsor. Merlin holds out both ties to Eggsy. 

He hangs them over the brass knob and returns to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him just in time to hear the key in the lock downstairs. 

He's nervous as all fuck and feels overdressed - the only concession he’s made is that he’s not in shoes or socks, and Merlin not even that - but, he _gets_ it. The ties are about expectation; that they're both dressed is about refusing to apply pressure. He's also starting to get that they've put the stabilisers on for him ( _Merlin and I have been about this for over ten years,_ Harry said, _and in that time you create space for spontaneity. With you, we negotiate beforehand_ ) but that doesn't make him feel angry or condescended to. He's learnt in the course of his research that only a complete knob would throw in a newbie at the deep end. 

He feels respected.

It’s a sensation that’s almost entirely new to his life at Kingsman.

The bedroom door opens. Eggsy’s gaze drops to Harry’s hand immediately: both ties, still tied, dangling from his fingers. His cock twitches, his stomach twists, but then he looks back up to his face and sees the gentle half-smile there.

“May I change?” Harry asks; Merlin makes a permissive gesture in the direction of the en suite bathroom.

“Be our guest.”

Eggsy hears a completely inappropriate snatch of Disney in his head and tells it to fuck off. Harry lays down the ties carefully to one side, then shuts the door behind him.

"Alright?" Merlin says.

"Yeah. S'just...it's..."

"Real, now," Merlin suggests.

"Yeah." He pushes out a breath. "Yeah, 'xactly."

Harry reappears at the door ten minutes later. He's naked - which is the kind of treat Eggsy is never going to get used to, or start taking for granted - and he's still pink from a quick shower. His hair is soft and damp, styling oil washed out; there's a relaxed slump to his shoulders and in his spine which takes a moment for Eggsy to recognise. It's the posture of someone who isn't bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. For once.

He doesn't make eye contact with either of them; he closes the door behind him and folds onto his knees between their feet, boneless and elegant. When he looks up at Merlin there's a softness in his features that Eggsy's never seen before. He looks younger, vulnerable.

"Sir," he says quietly, to Merlin, then gives Eggsy a shy sideways glance from beneath lowered lashes.

"This is Eggsy," Merlin says. "You're to mind him just like you do me, you understand?"

"Yes, sir." Another shy little look, though this time there's fleeting eye contact and Eggsy isn't even hard yet but he thinks he might nut in his boxers from that face alone. "Sirs."

"There we go." Merlin pets his hair and Harry tilts his head into it like a cat, unselfconscious in accepting the comfort. "Now show Eggsy how you tell me you're glad to be home."

Eggsy stares, rapt and turned on and weirdly scandalised, as Harry bows his head and kisses the gleaming leather of Merlin's left shoe. And then his _tongue_ flickers out, vividly red against the black, and Eggsy's vision goes weird around the edges.

At first, he just watches. The softly spoken orders, the praise when he obeys, the way Harry sinks into it like he's being wrapped in velvet. When Eggsy's watched fetishy porn on Redtube (who hasn't, right...?) it's all kind of harsh. Girls or blokes getting slapped around and humiliated and admittedly he can get off on it, but the second after he's come and it's still playing it makes him feel kind of squeamish and uncomfortable. 

When he’d kind-of-sort-of tried to articulate that discomfort during their negotiations, Merlin had gotten a longer explanation out of him, then Harry had just shaken his head and said, _we won’t be doing anything like that_. And it _is_ nothing like that. Merlin doesn't ask for anything Harry doesn't want to give; this isn't about _testing_ him or making him trip up. It's about taking any responsibility out of his hands and letting him unwind. 

Once he understands that, he can unwind too. He looks down at where Harry's kneeling between Merlin's legs, carefully massaging one bare foot and looking...relaxed. Not 'Galahad relaxed' - calm, controlled, suppressed - but actually at rest. Focused on the task, yes, but pleasantly and unguardedly so. 

Merlin has apparently been waiting for him to reach this stage. 

"I'm being selfish," he murmurs. "Eggsy?"

"Oh. Yeah." He stares at Harry, and Harry looks back at him with dark, liquid eyes. He looks like he's in the middle of a daydream. It's so alien that he can't help but -

"Um. Check in?"

Instantly he feels stupid. They told him he could ask and be asked, at any time - but Harry would just say something if he wasn't okay, wouldn't he? He feels his face starting to turn hot. Fucking stupid. He _trusts_ Harry. What's he going to think of him asking him to - like he doesn't think he'd -

"Green," Harry says softly, calmly, and everything that had gotten twisted inside him goes slack.

He exhales.

"Yeah. Me too." And it gives him confidence. He stands up, over Harry, and the faith and the power he's being offered makes his blood run hotter in his veins.

"...strip us off, then," and Harry kneels up and reaches for his shirt buttons and just _does_ it. 

Yeah, he's okay with this.

**Author's Note:**

> Next time: unadulterated filth, I promise.


End file.
